Occasionally we hear disturbing stories in the media about young people who perpetrate abuse against the elderly. In a widely reported 2009 story, for example, caretakers at the Quadrangle Assisted Living facility outside Philadelphia were charged in connection with the abuse of an elderly patient n...

A recent news report described the unusual story of a baby’s birth from his grandmother’s womb. A 29-year old woman from Sweden, born without a uterus, received a transplanted womb from her mother, the same womb that had brought her into the worl...

The prospect of a very attractive, recently-married young woman with a terminal illness facing excruciating pain and suffering as she dies is enough to move anyone. The life and death of 29-year-old Brittany Maynard recently captured enormous media a...

In the current debate over gay marriage, people sometimes ask: Who should define marriage? Democrats or Republicans in Congress? The Supreme Court? Should it be put to a referendum, allowing the majority to choose a definition?
We can identify two k...

Planning for end of life situations is important. We should put in place an advance directive before our health takes a serious turn for the worse and we are no longer able to indicate our own wishes or make our own decisions. Advance directives can ...

Artificial insemination introduces sperm into a woman’s body by use of a thin tube (cannula) or other instrument to bring about a pregnancy. Artificial insemination can be either homologous (using s...

Producing human embryos in the laboratory for research purposes makes most people uneasy. Even those who tolerate the creation of embryos in test tubes so that infertile couples might have children wi...

A June 2014 article in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), written by researchers from the National Institute on Drug Abuse and the National Institutes of Health, points out that marijuana is ...

A number of serious diseases are known to occur because of defects or mutations in our DNA. Curing such diseases could in principle be carried out by rewriting the DNA to fix the mutated base pairs. Y...

Among married men and women who undergo surgical sterilization through a vasectomy or a tubal ligation, it has been estimated that anywhere from 10 to 20 percent will come to regret the choice.
Somet...